Acid jazz turns 25: The story of a scene

Metro speaks exclusively to DJ Eddie Pillar, the pioneer of Acid Jazz as the genre that spawned The Brand New Heavies and Jamiroquai celebrates 25 years on the music scene.

Acid Jazz head honcho and DJ Eddie Piller

‘The story of this label is the story of a scene… we’ve never fully appreciated our position before but hearing these tracks together is so evocative of a time when everything changed,’ says Acid Jazz boss Eddie Piller.

The club and radio DJ (6Music, The Modcast), and Essex-born geezer, is gruffly mulling over the previous night’s party – a private bash for his label’s silver anniversary – and the 25 years before that. It’s a ripe old age to have reached in the fickle music industry. Piller and label cohort (and savvy compiler) Dean Rudland have sealed Acid Jazz’s flavours into a rich multi-disc box set spanning its classic funk and soul roots, its crossover hits from dapper signings such as The Brand New Heavies, The James Taylor Quartet, A Man Called Adam and Jamiroquai, its party shakers and remixes.It’s not a conventional history lesson, more a snapshot of a pivotal point when British club culture morphed, embraced new forms and had far-reaching effects.

Acid jazz was also an offshoot of the rave scene around 1986/1987, as seasoned mod and jazz fan Piller, label co-founder Gilles Peterson and their fellow DJs began to discover Ibiza’s acid house sound.

‘Within six months of acid hysteria in London, I was getting bored with the music,’ admits Piller. ‘We loved the clubs’ atmosphere but wanted to bring things back to the spark of the black music we loved.

‘This was a youth culture based accidentally on eclecticism, where you’d hear a jazz track next to a Public Enemy record or a funky Led Zeppelin track. Gilles said, for a laugh: “Why don’t we call it acid jazz?” It allowed us to start from year zero.’

‘Acid jazz had a breadth of tastes,’ agrees Dean Rudland, who joined the label’s team in the early 1990s (Peterson left to launch influential ‘friendly rival’ label Talkin’ Loud in 1990). ‘It was just a decade after punk but we went from soul and psych-rock to reggae and dance of all styles.’

Acid jazz group The Brand New Heavies were one of the many artists who put the genre in the public eye

Around the turn of the 1990s, acid jazz really became a mainstream contender; Piller recalls DJing at intimate Sunday jazz dances (‘you couldn’t even get a beer after 2pm but the atmosphere was stunning’), while Rudland describes his shock at looking over The Brand New Heavies’ sold-out Brixton Academy show in 1992. The label nodded to transatlantic sounds and established fanbases across Europe and the Far East, yet it remained distinctly British in tone.

‘That’s what the British are best at: we’re cultural magpies, mixing other music and making it better for us,’ says Piller. ‘Acid jazz was the latest conduit of that international outlook. It was a music thing that evolved into a fashion thing. It was also self-fulfilling; we started off listening to black music, young white kids such as Jamiroquai played their takes on it with a modern twist and that impacted around the world.’

That youth culture also came with a hippyish ethos; Acid Jazz signings from Galliano and Mother Earth to Jamiroquai served dance grooves with a right-on stance. ‘There was a big belief in 1970s right-on political theories,’ says Rudland. ‘The scene had grown out of a left-wing clubbing movement. People would leave Soho’s Wag Club on a Sunday night then join the protests outside the South African Embassy on the way to their night bus.’

Admittedly, becoming an established trend posed its own challenges, as Piller points out. ‘When some of our bands blew up internationally, suddenly everything was called “acid jazz”,’ he says.

Yet, while mainstream fashions have fluctuated, acid jazz has pushed forward with seasoned passion, celebrating both live musicianship and traditional recording techniques.

‘If you wanted to be in our world, you had to be a digger, whether it meant spending hours in a record shop or finding a particular suit,’ says Piller. ‘We are the last generation that had to search for culture. When everything is on a plate, you don’t make life-changing discoveries.’

‘It’s always about finding another record; where can we find more music?’ agrees Rudland, laughing. ‘We had to open our own club in the end. It was the most cutting-edge club of the late 1990s, yet we were still viewed as retro.’

That club was Hoxton’s legendary Blue Note (1993-1998), which triggered east London’s nightlife renaissance. That’s another of many stories that sprang from the Acid Jazz hotbed, fuelled by countless characters and chutzpah.

‘My proudest moment was persuading Terry Callier to come out of retirement,’ says Piller, whose fervour brought the reclusive Chicago soul man to global recognition, before his death last month. ‘Our whole story is about finding geniuses that were ignored.’

Acid Jazz: The 25th Anniversary Box Set (Harmless) is out now. Eddie Piller presents the monthly Modcast at www.themodcast.co.ukGo With The Flow – Acid Jazz Keynotes

VINYL ORIGINALS

The first single release on Acid Jazz was surreal beat poetry groove Frederick Lies Still by London jazz funkers Galliano, originally sold by hand in 1987. The track was a modern play on superfly soul hero Curtis Mayfield’s Freddie’s Dead and its lyrics (‘while the real hustlers screw millions from the unsuspecting billions’) also exuded ‘right-on’ spirit.LOOKING SHARP

Acid jazz really came to life on the dance floor – label founders Eddie Piller and Gilles Peterson first clicked at Nicky Holloway’s seminal mid-1980s club, Special Branch, and the all-inclusive party energy spread from London (in particular, the Wag Club and Dingwalls) to the rest of Britain and beyond. Further anniversary raves are planned for early 2013.BIG HITTERS

Infectiously entertaining: Jamiroquai

Infectiously catchy, immaculately played early 1990s hits from label signings The Brand New Heavies (originally led by US chanteuse N’Dea Davenport), The James Taylor Quartet and Jamiroquai (led by Jay Kay, pictured above) earned global props and brought Acid Jazz to a mainstream audience.FUTURE CUTS

The Acid Jazz label continues to ‘dig the new breed’, releasing eclectic music from the likes of Manchester’s Janice Graham Band and comic actor/deep crooner Matt Berry. It still comes back to the heavyweight vinyl – just as well, as Piller doesn’t own an MP3 player.